When members of the elite U.S. Navy SEAL team raided a Somali villa this weekend in an attempted “snatch and grab” operation, they were faced with not one, but three high-level targets and were driven back by fighters ready to defend their leaders.

Western and Somali sources with knowledge of the predawn raid in the southern seaside town of Barawe say the commandos’ main target was Kenyan insurgent Abdukadir Mohamed Abdukadir, known by the nickname “Ikrima.”

A Kenyan intelligence report, leaked in the wake of last month’s four-day siege of Nairobi’s Westgate mall, cites Ikrima as an active operative in Kenya with links to the Somalia-based Al Shabab and to Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

Also in the villa during the raid was Mahad Mohamed Ali, known as “Karate,” said an intelligence source, who spoke to the Star on the condition of anonymity. A 2013 UN Security Council Monitoring Group report lists Karate as a leader of Al Shabab’s clandestine Amniyat division.

“Each Amniyat unit is autonomous, designated by a codename,” the report states, “and in principle unaware of other groups, for security reasons in case of arrest and interrogation. Intelligence is collected by smaller units, or even lone operatives, and transmitted to the unit commander, who then transmits necessary information to assassination or suicide squads to prepare operations.”

A third fighter, known by the nickname (kunya) Abu Hamza, was reportedly also in the villa.

However, the U.S. special forces unit — famously known for killing Osama bin Laden two years ago in Abbottabad, Pakistan — was forced by the intensity of the fighting to abort the raid without capturing Ikrima or the other two.

It is still unclear whether anyone in the villa was killed.

Matt Bryden, a Nairobi-based analyst and former head of the UN Monitoring Group, said the U.S. raid was ambitious, describing Barawe, about 180 kilometres south of Mogadishu, an “extremely hard target.”

“If you’ve been shooting for 15 minutes, you can expect a concentration of fighters to descend on the scene because it’s so densely populated with Al Shabab leaders, training facilities and followers,” he said.

U.S. strikes inside Somalia, whether by air or on the ground, are not new. In a daytime strike in Barawe in 2009, a Navy SEAL team killed Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, sought for his alleged role in the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

But intelligence sources say the Westgate massacre, which began Sept. 21, has dramatically shifted focus back to East Africa, where Al Qaeda first received international attention in the embassy bombings 15 years ago.

And while there may not be a direct connection between the Navy SEAL raid and the Westgate attack, the weekend raid took on greater urgency in the wake of the Nairobi assault, which killed more than 65 people, including two Canadians.

“My understanding is that the U.S. has plenty of intelligence and much of it actionable,” said Bryden. “The problem is deciding what kind of action is possible and appropriate.”

One intelligence source classified the Westgate attack as a “joint operation,” drawing on the experience of older Al Qaeda fighters and combining it with the training and blessing of Shabab leadership: a heady mixture of the old and new fighters. Bryden agreed that Al Qaeda’s presence in East Africa has been a “generational cycle.”

Also on Saturday, in a co-ordinated mission thousands of kilometres to the northwest in Libya’s capital Tripoli, another U.S. special forces operation successfully netted a long-sought suspect in the 1998 embassy bombings.

The Tripoli “snatch and grab,” which captured Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai, known as Abu Anas al Libi, was reportedly carried by members of the U.S. Army Delta Force.

On Sunday, U.S. Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel said the two raids “send a strong message to the world that the United States will spare no effort to hold terrorists accountable.”

Al Libi’s relatives said in an interview with the Associated Press that he had never belonged to Al Qaeda and he had been living peacefully in Libya since returning there in 2011 after the ouster and killing of former dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

The Libyan government later reacted angrily to what it called a “kidnapping” of a Libyan citizen and demanded answers of Washington.